Deep Peace Poetry 2018

Be a Part of the Deep Peace Poetry Book

Can you write a short poem which engenders a feeling of peace? It can reflect your love of nature, or your love of animals. A love of the landscape or your family, or anything that makes you feel serene.

If so, we’d like to invite you to submit it for consideration to be part of our Deep Peace Poetry book. We’re going to choose the best poems and publish them as a curated anthology. Sales will support the animals of the Deep Peace Trust’s farm animal sanctuary. This fundraising event benefits the animals, as well as the poets, who will have their work published.

On another, deeper, level, this kind of poetry is important in today’s world, which is filled with so much turmoil and fear. Each short poem will be paired with an image to create a beautiful book that offers hope, feelings of peace, and a sharing of the human connection with the natural world. The Trust’s mission is about fostering a world of deep peace for all species. That’s why we’re looking for poems which show a deep understanding of life beyond the mundane, that celebrate beauty and love, which share an observation of beauty in the natural world, or which simply soothes the reader’s soul.

How to Enter

Got a poem you’d like to submit? Is it 2,000 characters or less? We’ love to see it.

The entry fee is $10 per poem (proceeds from the entry fees also go toward the care of the animals.) Feel free to enter as many poems as you’d like, just match the entry fee to the number of poems in your submission. Simply pay on the Trust’s donation page and mark it “Poetry Competition” where you can make a note in the PayPal form. Write down or note your receipt number.

Click here to go to the submission form. It will ask you your details, have a place for you to enter your poem, and asks for your PayPal receipt number for your donation.

Thank you for being part of Deep Peace Poetry. Let’s change the world together!

Inspiration

Here are some ideas to get you started with your writing.

The Celtic Nature Poem

Billie teaches this form of poetry to help people connect more deeply to beauty and find the peace which nature offers us. It is short—just two lines—and it can be surprisingly effective.

Simply go outside and really look around you. What do you see? What is beauty to you? Then come inside and write it down starting with the words, “Beautiful is…” Then the second line starts with, “Beautiful, too,…”

Example:

Beautiful is the summer dress of the Hawthorn tree, all green with berries of red.

Beautiful, too, are the birds who flock to her, filling our day with song and laughter, as wonderfully, they are fed.

View from My Window

This is simply a poem which draws beauty from whatever you are seeing out of your window. You might look out over a garden, or a lone tree on the sidewalk. You might find beauty in water on pavement, or the moon in a silver-lit sky. Write about it, keeping it short. Note: these can be satisfying when they rhyme.

Haiku

A Haiku poem is a Japanese poetry form, which doesn’t rhyme, is usually about nature or the seasons (but can be about anything), and the traditional form has 17 syllables over three lines– five in the first and last, seven in the middle line.

About the Deep Peace Trust

The Deep Peace Trust is a not-for-profit vegan charity with a vision of a gentle, safe world for all species and a mission to help foster that world of peace and benevolence for all, through the arts, education (teaching wisdom classes), and compassionate action,. The Trust runs the Deep Peace Farm Animal Sanctuary, a forever home for 460 formerly at-risk animals, from wild horses, to cows, sheep, goats, dogs, cats and geese. We have been established for two decades.

Legal Stuff

When you submit your form, you’ll be asked to agree to the following terms:

You grant the Billie Dean Deep Peace Trust a non-exclusive, worldwide license to publish your work in all media and formats in perpetuity.

You retain copyright in your original work.

You warrant that it is an original work, and that you have the right to assign this license.

You understand that you will receive one electronic copy of the original publication. If print or other formats are created, author copies of these will not be provided (due to cost).

You understand that the work is being licensed for free to, and for the benefit of, the Deep Peace Trust, to use unencumbered as it sees fit, including for fundraising purposes.